After months of leaks, Microsoft has finally revealed Internet Explorer 9 to the public and made it freely available for users to try as part of a public beta, and although the official release is still some months off, the IE9 beta gives an impressive first glance at what Microsoft has done to bring its much-criticized browser finally up-to-date with the times.

What’s new? Basically, it all boils down to a new look, hugely expanded support for HTML5 and a big speed boost.

The new user interface takes the idea of inverting tabs from Google Chrome, as well as the latter browser’s unified search and address bar, which as far as we’re concerned should be a standard approach adopted by all browsers.

Recognizing that most people look at sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter as apps rather than web pages, you can now pin a frequently visited website to your Windows taskbar. Interestingly, once you do this, all of the browser buttons change to match the favicon, which helps make the site seem like an application in itself.

The speed boost is equally impressive: we’re seeing huge performance bumps thanks to IE9’s embrace of hardware acceleration inside the browser, as well as a new Javascript engine. The HTML5 and CSS3 interpretations are also top notch.

We’ll have more impressions once we have more time to play around with IE9, but so far, this seems like the best Internet Explorer yet. Microsoft is finally getting on the same browser train as the rest of us.